Easter around the world: how different cultures celebrate the season

Easter is one of those holidays that most of us think we understand — eggs, chocolate, maybe a roast dinner, a long weekend off work. But the way Easter is celebrated around the world is so wildly varied, so layered with history and local tradition, that the version we know is really just one small corner of a much bigger picture.

However you mark Easter, it helps to know where it all comes from and how billions of people celebrate the season in ways you might never have heard of.

Why Easter matters

Easter is the most important date in the Christian calendar — more significant than Christmas, though it rarely gets the same commercial fanfare. It commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, three days after his crucifixion. For the world's 2.4 billion Christians, it represents hope, renewal, and the triumph of life over death.

But Easter's roots stretch further back than Christianity itself. The timing — always in spring — connects it to ancient festivals celebrating rebirth, fertility, and the return of light after winter. The word "Easter" likely derives from Ēostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and dawn. Eggs, hares, and new life were her symbols long before they became ours.

That blend of sacred meaning and seasonal celebration is part of what makes Easter so interesting. It's a holiday where church services, pagan symbolism, and chocolate bunnies coexist without anyone finding it particularly strange.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom — eggs, bonnets, and rolling

In Britain, Easter is synonymous with chocolate eggs, hot cross buns, and the rare luxury of a four-day weekend. Children hunt for eggs in the garden, families gather for a Sunday roast (usually lamb), and someone inevitably eats their entire stash of mini eggs before noon on Saturday.

But some older traditions persist. In Preston, Lancashire, the annual Egg Rolling competition has been running since the 1800s — children decorate hard-boiled eggs and roll them down the steep slope of Avenham Park. The egg that travels the furthest without cracking wins.

Easter bonnets — homemade hats decorated with flowers, chicks, and ribbons — are still a fixture in many primary schools, with parades and prizes that are taken far more seriously than any adult would care to admit.

🇬🇷 Greece — midnight fireworks and red eggs

Greek Easter is an experience like no other. The Orthodox calendar means it often falls on a different date to Western Easter, and the celebrations are intense, communal, and deeply moving.

On Good Friday, a funeral procession (the Epitaphios) moves through every town and village, accompanied by sombre chanting and candlelight. The mood is grief-stricken — shops close, flags fly at half-mast, and entire communities walk together in silence.

Then comes Saturday night. At midnight, churches across the country plunge into darkness. The priest emerges with a single flame, passes it to the congregation candle by candle, and the words "Christos Anesti" — Christ is risen — ring out into the night. Fireworks explode. Bells peal. In some towns, this involves actual dynamite.

Families then gather to crack red-dyed eggs against each other (the unbroken egg brings good luck for the year) and eat magiritsa, a traditional lamb soup, well past midnight. Sunday brings whole lambs roasted on spits in every garden, square, and hillside.

🇸🇪 Sweden — Easter witches

If you visited Sweden at Easter without warning, you might think you'd accidentally arrived at Halloween.

On the Thursday before Easter, children dress as Easter witches (påskkärringar) — wearing old clothes, headscarves, and painted rosy cheeks — and go door to door with copper kettles, trading hand-drawn Easter cards for sweets. It's essentially trick-or-treating, and it has roots in an old belief that witches flew to a mountain called Blåkulla to consort with the devil on the Thursday before Easter.

Bonfires are lit on Easter Eve to ward off evil spirits, and homes are decorated with birch twigs hung with colourful feathers — a tradition so visually cheerful it makes British Easter decorations look a bit half-hearted.

🇵🇭 Philippines — crucifixion re-enactments

The Philippines takes Easter observance to a level that startles most visitors. In the province of Pampanga, devotees participate in real crucifixion re-enactments — they are actually nailed to wooden crosses and hoisted up, remaining there for several minutes before being brought down and treated by medics.

The practice is controversial and discouraged by the Catholic Church, but it draws thousands of participants and spectators every year. For those involved, it's an act of extreme devotion, sacrifice, and gratitude — a deeply personal expression of faith.

Elsewhere in the country, the Salubong — a dawn re-enactment of the risen Christ meeting his mother Mary — is a joyful and theatrical celebration involving elaborate floats, fireworks, and entire communities gathering before sunrise.

🇧🇲 Bermuda — homemade kites

In Bermuda, Easter means kites. Specifically, large, colourful, handmade kites built from tissue paper, wooden sticks, and string, flown on Good Friday at Horseshoe Bay Beach.

The tradition is said to have started when a local teacher, struggling to explain the Ascension of Christ to his Sunday school class, built a kite in the shape of a cross and flew it into the sky. The lesson stuck — and so did the activity.

Today, families spend weeks building increasingly elaborate kites, some geometric, some enormous, all handmade. Good Friday on the beach is a national event, with hot cross buns (Bermuda's are baked with a distinctive spiced sweetness), codfish cakes, and the annual spectacle of beautifully made kites either soaring gracefully or crashing spectacularly into the sea.

🇫🇮 Finland — palm Sunday birch branches

In Finland, Palm Sunday is marked by children going door to door with decorated willow branches (birch, in practice — palms don't grow in Finland), gently tapping residents with the branches while reciting a rhyme that wishes them good health. In return, they receive chocolate eggs and sweets.

The tradition blends Christian Palm Sunday observance with older folk beliefs about warding off evil spirits with the birch branches. Like many Finnish traditions, it's charmingly practical — you use what you have, and birch is what you have.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia — Fasika

Ethiopian Easter, known as Fasika, follows the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar and typically falls one or two weeks after Western Easter. It marks the end of a 55-day fasting period called Hudade — one of the most demanding religious fasts in Christianity, during which no animal products of any kind are consumed.

On Easter Saturday night, worshippers gather for an all-night church service that can last until 3am. At its conclusion, the fast is broken with a feast of doro wat (spicy chicken stew) and injera (sourdough flatbread), eaten together in enormous family gatherings. After nearly two months without meat, the meal carries a sense of joy and relief that's hard to overstate.

🇵🇱 Poland — Śmigus-Dyngus (Wet Monday)

On Easter Monday in Poland, people throw water at each other. And not politely.

Śmigus-Dyngus, also known as Wet Monday, is a national tradition where everyone — especially young people — arms themselves with water pistols, buckets, and anything else that holds liquid, and drenches anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Historically, boys would pour water over girls they were interested in. Today, it's a cheerful free-for-all. Nobody is safe.

The tradition has pre-Christian roots connected to the cleansing power of water and the arrival of spring. The practical advice for visitors: if you're in Poland on Easter Monday, wear clothes you don't mind losing.

🇦🇺 Australia — the Easter Bilby

Australia celebrates Easter with a twist. Rabbits — the traditional Easter symbol everywhere else — are an invasive species in Australia, responsible for devastating agricultural damage and threatening native wildlife. So in the 1990s, a campaign began to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby — a small, long-eared marsupial native to Australia and critically endangered.

Today, chocolate bilbies sit alongside chocolate bunnies in Australian shops, and a portion of proceeds from many brands goes directly to bilby conservation. It's one of the few examples of a country collectively deciding to rewrite a global tradition in favour of something more locally meaningful.

What stays the same, everywhere

The details change — eggs, kites, water fights, midnight fireworks, chocolate bilbies — but the heartbeat underneath is always the same.

Easter is about people coming together. It's about marking the turn of the season, the return of warmth, the belief that something new is beginning. It's about families who don't see each other often enough sitting down at the same table. It's about traditions passed from grandparents to grandchildren, carried forward not because anyone made them, but because they meant something.

And whether your version of Easter involves a solemn church service, a chaotic egg hunt, or simply a long weekend catching up with the people you love, the impulse behind it is the same: connection.

You might be sending Easter wishes to your mum, a "happy spring" to a friend you haven't spoken to in months, or a silly card to a nephew who'd quite like a chocolate bilby. It takes two minutes, it's completely free, and it'll make someone's day.